‘A Certain Grain of Stupidity’

In 1961, on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia, Eleanor “Sandy” Torrey West and her husband founded a residency, the Ossabaw Island Project (OIP). As Christopher Alessandrini writes in our October 8 issue, the island—which West had inherited from her patrician parents—was “a patchwork landscape of salt marshes and maritime forests, tidal creeks and interdune meadows, feral hogs and plovers, lofty cabbage palms and live oaks hung with portieres of Spanish moss.” It was the perfect setting for what became, alongside Genesis, a sister program founded there a decade later, a “multidisciplinary retreat” for a “Who’s Who of twentieth-century American cultural history,” including writers and artists like Ralph Ellison and Sally Mann, as well as “scientists, historians, literary theorists, naturalists, religious leaders, philosophers, businesspeople, and anthropologists.”Alessandrini is a managing editor in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s digital department. His writing has appeared in, among other places, Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, Interview, and the anthology Points of View: 100 Connections to Art (2026) from Yale University Press. For the Review, he has also written about the pa...